Acclaimed novelist Sayed Kashua, the creator of the groundbreaking Israeli sitcom, “Arab Labor,” has been widely praised for his literary eye and deadpan wit. His new novel is considered internationally to be his most accomplished and entertaining work yet.
Winner of the prestigious Bernstein Award, Second Person Singular centers on an ambitious lawyer who is considered one of the best Arab criminal attorneys in Jerusalem. He has a thriving practice in the Jewish part of town, a large house, speaks perfect Hebrew, and is in love with his wife and two young children. One day at a used bookstore, he picks up a copy of Tolstoy’s The Kreutzer Sonata, and inside finds a love letter, in Arabic, in his wife’s handwriting. Consumed with suspicion and jealousy, the lawyer hunts for the book’s previous owner—a man named Yonatan—pulling at the strings that hold all their lives together.
With enormous emotional power, and a keen sense of the absurd, Kashua spins a tale of love and betrayal, honesty and artifice, and questions whether it is possible to truly reinvent ourselves. Second Person Singular is a deliciously complex psychological mystery and a searing dissection of the individuals that comprise a divided society.
About Sayed Kashua
Sayed Kashua was born in Tira in the Triangle region of Israel. In 1990, he was accepted to a prestigious boarding school in Jerusalem - Israel Arts and Science Academy. He studied sociology and philosophy at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. Kashua was a resident of Beit Safafa before moving to a Jewish neighborhood of Jerusalem with his wife and two children. Kashua writes satirical columns in Hebrew for Haaretz newspaper and a local Jerusalem weekly, HaIr. In a humorous, tongue-in-cheek style, Kashua addresses the problems faced by Arabs in Israel, caught between two worlds.
Editorial Review
He’s sitting pretty, this Arab from the villages of northern Israel; at only 32, he’s one of the top criminal-defense lawyers in Jerusalem, and an expert navigator through the thicket of Arab-Jewish relations. The unnamed lawyer also has a good marriage to Leila, a social worker; it may lack passion, but Leila makes sure the household, which includes two small children, runs like clockwork. The lawyer’s calm, measured tone changes dramatically when a note falls from the used book, a Tolstoy novella, he’s about to read. It’s in his wife’s handwriting and could be construed as erotic. The calculating lawyer turns into a raging monster of sexual jealousy. Has Tolstoy’s wife-killer leapt from the page to possess him? Or is his naïveté about matters of the heart taking its toll? (The lawyer has no experience with other women.) Disappointingly, these questions go unanswered, and their urgency ebbs as Kashua introduces another character, Amir, the protagonist of alternating sections. It’s an awkward structure, made more so by a six-year time difference. Back then Amir, also an immigrant to Jerusalem from an Arab village, was a newly minted social worker, a socially inept kid who went on a not-quite-date with his co-worker Leila, who afterwards wrote that altogether innocent note. So there’s the slender plot connection. Amir has a second job as a caregiver for Yonatan, a young Jewish man in a vegetative state. Gradually Amir assumes Yonatan’s identity. He’s alienated from his mother but finds a willing surrogate in Yonatan’s mother; together, they pull the plug on the Jew and Amir buries him in an Arab cemetery. Creepy, for sure, yet the sequence resolves nothing. By now the time periods are in sync. The lawyer has tracked down Amir, who tells him everything, and the lawyer’s marriage returns to normal; much ado about nothing, then. – Kirkus Reviews
‘Second Person Singular’ by Sayed Kashua
The Chicago Tribune Book Review – May 17, 2012 (Excerpt)
Early in the novel, “Second Person Singular,” a main character known throughout the book as “the lawyer” reads a note in his wife’s handwriting. “I waited for you, but you didn’t come,” the note says. “I hope everything’s all right. I wanted to thank you for last night. It was wonderful. Call me tomorrow?”
The sense of intimacy leaps off the page. But the note was not written for the lawyer. It fell out of a copy of Tolstoy’s “The Kreutzer Sonata” he had just bought from a used-book store. The words were meant for someone else, and the discovery uncorks the lawyer’s bottled-up insecurities, pushing him to near madness as he convinces himself that his loving wife is a faithless adulterer.
We know the lawyer’s leap to conclusion is irrational. And at first, it’s a bothersome step into this new novel by Sayed Kashua, an Arab journalist in Jerusalem who writes in Hebrew (this is the American version, translated by Mitch Ginsburg of a work first published in 2010). It’s hard to buy that someone with the intellectual training to become a leading criminal defense lawyer would tumble to such depths of delusion based on an unexplained note. [Read the full article...]
THE LONDONDERRY AIR
Testament of an Ulster Gunman A Novel by Garrad Gawler
It all changed for Charles Cunningham, a Physics teacher at the local College of Technology in the County Derry town of Maddenstown, on a June afternoon in 1973 when a bomb exploded in his neighborhood. He answers an advertisement by the UDR, the Ulster Defence Regiment, but, in the time to come, he will experience the consequences of his decisions, and how his involvement complicates matters with family and friends, Protestants and Catholics alike, to an unexpected degree.
With “The Londonderry Air – Testament of an Ulster Gunman” Garrad Gawler describes in minute detail and with an astonishing level of authenticity not only the inner workings of the Ulster Defence Regiment, but also the activities of underground paramilitary groups of regular citizens who planned and carried out the assassination of suspected Republican terrorists in their neighborhood.
We are the only country that makes guns, including military-style assault weapons, available to anyone who wants to buy them. This is not freedom. It is a tyranny of death and destruction — a tyranny of which the National Rifle Association is proud. The Washington Post
